There is known and in use a digital printer of the type in which a fraction of the data generated through scanning of an original image can be disabled or inhibited from being output for actual use in reproducing the original image or the dark and light portions of the original image can be inverted to produce a blanked-out image area of a print sheet. These functions of the digital printer are executed on the basis of data stored in an image data storage memory capable of storing image data for the total area of a single page of image-carrying medium.
Thus, an image reading and processing apparatus of the described type has a problem in that the apparatus is required to use a memory device having such a large data storage capacity. An expedient useful for eliminating such a problem will be to use an "attribute" data storage memory for storing the characteristic conditions in which an original image is to be reproduced. An attribute data storage memory of this nature still has a drawback in that the attribute data stored in the memory is prepared on the basis of the image data for a specific magnification/reduction ratio for image reproduction and for this reason, one set of attribute data is required for the reproduction of an image at one magnification/reduction ratio and another set of attribute data is required for the reproduction of the same image at another magnification/reduction ratio.